Cambridge University Library houses the world's largest and most
significant collection of the personal papers of Charles Robert
Darwin (1809-1882), the British naturalist who was the first fully
to articulate a theory of how all living things have evolved from a
common ancestor. The single largest category of material in the
Darwin archive, however, is not his experiment notes or theoretical
notebooks but letters: more than 9,000 of the 15,000 letters Darwin
is known to have written and received in his lifetime are in the
Cambridge collection. It was largely through letters that Darwin
gathered the data that first allowed him to develop his theories,
and later to illustrate his arguments, and it was through
discussion in letters that he honed his ideas and built strategic
relationships with colleagues and supporters: they are an integral
part of Darwin's scientific legacy.

Darwin corresponded with around 2,000 people from all around the
world and all walks of life. His correspondents included other
leading scientists and thinkers, such as the geologist Charles
Lyell, the philosopher Herbert Spencer, the zoologist Thomas Henry
Huxley, and the other man whose name is linked to species theory,
Alfred Russel Wallace. No single set of letters was more important
to Darwin, however, or is more important now, than those exchanged
with his closest friend, the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker
(1817-1911). At around 10% of Darwin's surviving correspondence,
the 1,200 letters published here provide a structure within which
all the other letters can be explored. They are a connecting thread
that spans forty years of Darwin's mature working life from 1843
until his death in 1882. They bring into sharp focus every aspect
of Darwin's scientific work throughout that period, and illuminate
the mutual friendships he and Hooker shared with other scientists,
but they also provide a window of unparalleled intimacy into the
personal lives of the two men.

Their correspondence began in 1843 when Hooker, just returned
from James Clark Ross's Antarctic expedition, and already an
admirer of the older man, was approached about working on Darwin's
collection of plants from the Beagle voyage. Just the
previous year Darwin had written out his first coherent account of
the main elements of his species theory, and within a few months
Hooker was admitted into the small and select group of those with
whom Darwin felt able to discuss his emerging ideas. In perhaps his
most famous letter of all,
Darwin wrote to Hooker in January 1844 of his growing conviction
that species "are not ... immutable" - an admission he likened,
half jokingly, to "confessing a murder". When Alfred Russel Wallace
(1823-1913) sent Darwin a letter in 1858 outlining an almost
identical theory to his own, it was Hooker, together with Charles
Lyell, who engineered the simultaneous publication of papers by
both men, and secured Darwin's claim to the theory of "modification
through descent" by means of the mechanism Darwin called "natural
selection".

It was also to Hooker that Darwin, writing furiously in the
succeeding months, sent batches of the manuscript of On the
Origin of Species for comment, and Hooker continued to be a
sounding board for successive publications.

Much of the most important experimental work conducted by Darwin
after the publication of Origin was on variation and
adaptation in plants, in particular the mechanisms by which various
plants are nourished, reproduce, and colonise. Hooker, who after
ten years as assistant director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew,
succeeded his father as director in 1865, was perfectly placed to
provide Darwin with exotic species, and to help him build vital
global networks of well-informed correspondents.

Hooker was a frequent visitor to Darwin at his home in Downe,
Kent, and became a great favourite of Darwin's children. The two
men shared their experience of attending the birth of their
children: Darwin advocated the
use of chloroform which he thought as "composing to oneself as
well as to the patient". It was to Darwin that Hooker wrote just an
hour after the death of his
six year-old daughter, Maria, knowing that his friend, who had
lost both a ten year-old daughter and a baby son, would all too
clearly understand his grief. Those letters are amongst the most
poignant in the collection.

Of the many hundreds of letters that passed between Darwin and
Hooker, over 1,200 are still known to survive, and all but a
handful are in the Cambridge Darwin archive. Darwin's son Francis
incorporated many extracts in two published editions of his
father's letters, in 1888 and 1902, the second of which he
dedicated to Hooker "in remembrance of his lifelong friendship with
Charles Darwin". At some time between those two editions, Hooker
returned Darwin's letters to the family, retaining copies for
himself; those copies now form part of the Hooker archive at the
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Both sides of the original
correspondence, bound into several large volumes, arrived in
Cambridge University Library, in 1948, together with the bulk of
the Darwin archive, following transfer of ownership from the Darwin
family, supported by funding from The Pilgrim Trust.

The Cambridge Digital Library, and the Darwin Correspondence
Project, are very pleased to be able to publish images of
almost the entire correspondence between Charles Darwin and Joseph
Hooker, together with transcriptions of more than 1,000 of their
letters. These are being published simultaneously through CUDL and
on the The Darwin Correspondence Project
website.

It is because of the vital importance of the letters to a full
understanding of Darwin’s life and work that the University Library
is host to the Darwin Correspondence Project. The Project exists to
research and publish all of Darwin's surviving letters, reuniting
those in the Library’s collection with others from collections
around the world. The letters not only provide an invaluable
insight into Darwin's mind throughout his working life, but also
offer modern readers of all ages an engaging and accessible route
into his published writings.

The American
Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) jointly manages the
Darwin Correspondence Project together with Cambridge University
Library. It is a private, nonprofit federation of scholarly
organizations, and the preeminent representative of American
scholarship in the humanities and related social sciences.

The National
Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent US federal
agency created by Congress in 1950 "to promote the progress of
science". NSF has supported the Darwin Correspondence Project since
its foundation and has paid for the digitisation of the
Darwin-Hooker Correspondence. Digitisation of the letters between
Charles Darwin and Joseph Hooker was supported under grant no.
SES-0957520.

The Cambridge
University Press, in partnership with the Darwin
Correspondence Project, is publishing the definitive edition of
letters written by and to Charles Darwin. These are published in
chronological order in The correspondence of Charles Darwin
(F. Burkhardt, et al. eds, Cambridge University Press 1985-). When
complete the edition will comprise approximately thirty
volumes.

Under the leadership of Dr Leonard Polonsky and as part of its
International Digitisation Project, The Polonsky Foundation
has provided major funding towards the development of the digital
library's infrastructure.

Both portraits are from the Darwin Papers. The Darwin image is a
detail from an 1849 lithograph by Thomas Herbert Maguire (DAR
219.12:4). The Hooker photograph is by an unknown photographer,
c.1870 (DAR 257:114).

By continuing to use the site you agree to the use of cookies. You can
find out more in our help section.